


Sending All My Love Along the Wire

by roseandheather



Category: Code Black (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 04:28:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6596677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseandheather/pseuds/roseandheather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Ed goes on a very long trip, Leanne is a bit of a bitch about it, and Neal has been telling tales out of school.</p><p>But even the longest trips end up back at home again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sending All My Love Along the Wire

"So, are you missing me yet?"

His snort, when it comes, is mingled exhaustion and joy. _"Leanne,_ " he says on the other end of a cursedly long phone line, " _I started missing you about two minutes after I got into the line for security._ "

"So... about two minutes after we said goodbye, then?"

 _"See? There's a reason they call you brilliant._ "

"Funny," she says, with a lightness she doesn't feel. "That seems to be right around the time I started missing you, too."

 _"Coincidence, I'm sure,"_ he says, and doesn't mean a word of it.

"Oh, of course," she lies, her voice catching in her throat as the sheer _emptiness_ of the space around her begins to make itself felt. "God, Ed - I wish you were here!"

 _"I wish I was anywhere you are,"_ he says hoarsely, and she lets out a half-laugh, half sob on the other end of the line. " _But we'll just have to do it this way. Talk to me, Lea. Tell me what happened today. Everything. The good, the bad, the ugly, and the just plain boring. If I can't have you, I at least want your voice."_

So she does. She tells him about Mario's complete inability to handle the flirtations of a seven-year-old girl, about Christa slipping on a puddle of vomit and collapsing in a fit of giggles for minutes afterward, and about Malaya singlehandedly saving a patient from incipient cardiac arrest when she spotted a minute change in his ECG. She tells him about Jesse trying to switch her coffee for decaf, about her ongoing hatred of Combos, and about how she kept finding herself looking around the ER, wondering where he was. She tells him _everything_ \- every detail she can remember - because every tiny, insignificant moment is one more moment she gets to spend on the line with his voice in her ear.

It's a pattern that repeats every night for the hellish month he's gone. At some point during the day - or, more frequently, the night - they will find time to talk with each other. Sometimes it's a few hasty stolen minutes in the locker room; sometimes she lies on their bed for hours, the phone tucked beneath her ear, listening to his voice across the long, lonely miles.

But every day, no matter what, she will find some way to have his voice in her ear, no matter how briefly.

" _I had a chat with a friend of yours today,"_ he tells her one night. _"Word is that you're making everyone around you miserable and stalking around looking for something to pounce on like an offended cat. This friend puts the blame squarely on my shoulders, by the way."_

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she says primly, and mentally begins sketching out plots to a) find the miscreant and b) kill them - or at least fire them.

 _"Oh?"_ he says, patently amused. _"So you_ didn't _tell Neal to, and I quote, 'get his sorry British butt back down to trauma where he belongs instead of lurking around upstairs with a scalpel like a serial killer'?"_

Leanne coughs. "Well. Ah."

_"And you didn't shout at Malaya for not having the test results you wanted even though she'd only gotten the sample for them five minutes earlier? Or tell Campbell to either get to work or get out of your way, because you didn't have time for his delicate ego?"_

This time she squirms. "I really don't know where you're hearing - "

 _"And you didn't make Christa cry by telling her that her cast wrapping was so bad a five-year-old could have done better? When the cast was perfectly neat in the first place?_ _"_

"She didn't _cry,_ " snaps Leanne defensively. "She just _sniffled._ " Then her brain catches up with her mouth, and she actually coughs in embarrassment. "Hey! Where are you hearing this, anyway?"

 _"I decline to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate a particular surgical liaison and his third-year resident girlfriend,"_ says Ed blandly, and laughs as he hears Leanne cursing.

"I'll have their heads for this," she grumbles. "Talk about tattling to the principal's office! I can't believe he'd - "

 _"I miss you, too, Lea,"_ he interrupts her gently, and all her defenses crumble.

"I miss you," she whispers, cursing the tears flooding her eyes. "I miss you so much, Ed."

 _"One more week,_ " he says soothingly, but it's like he's trying to convince himself as much as her.

"One week too long," she grumbles, and hugs her pillow more tightly.

~*~

The day Ed comes home, they hit their worst code black of the year.

"Call Gloria upstairs," she says wearily, gulping coffee. "Tell her I won't be able to make it and I'll see him at home - she'll know what I mean."

The receptionist nods, and Leanne turns back to her work, glancing longingly at the clock - _half an hour till he lands -_ with a heavy sigh.

An hour later, Mario's current patient doubles over in agony.

"Appendicitis!" he calls over the din, and all tiredness flees as she makes a beeline for the two of them. Mike is already in Center Stage, Malaya and Angus at his elbow, working on another patient; he'll be no help here. This is hers.

"Call Neal," she tells Risa, who nods and grabs the nearest phone. "Okay, Dr. Savetti, run it down for me!"

Neal is at her side five minutes later; he takes one look at the ultrasound and shakes his head. "We'll have to open him up here," he says grimly. "All the ORs are full. Mario, Leanne, gown up. And someone call Jesse!"

"Do you need help?" calls Christa over the din, from the bedside of her currently-between-seizures eight-year-old patient.

Neal shakes his head. "She needs you more than I do right now," he says, but Leanne doesn't miss the sadness around his eyes. "Gowns and gloves, people! Let's go!"

Half an hour later she's wrist-deep in their patient's abdomen, finger clamping down on a nicked vein. "Hemostat, please!" she barks, and a gloved hand appears almost instantly at her elbow.

She doesn't freeze because she can't afford to. Not then. But gloves or no, she knows that hand as well as she knows her own - perhaps better, given how often it's caressed every inch of her body. So she just sucks in a startled, ecstatic breath, and takes the instrument with a tender caress to the hand providing it that she wouldn't have used on anyone else.

"Here you go," Ed Harbert murmurs in her ear, and she feels tingles up and down her spine. "I'm here to help, Leanne."

Over his mask, Neal's eyes crease in pleasure. "Welcome aboard, Doctor," he says, and means it.

She's never worked in surgery with him before, and now she wishes she had. He has her instruments ready before she can even ask, his eyes impossibly warm whenever their gazes meet. It's as though he can read her thoughts; she barely has to speak, just holds out her hand for instruments and gauze and suture until he places them in her hands like magic.

They don't speak. They don't have to. She can't feel his breath on her face, not through his mask, but she can feel _him,_ a steady warmth at her back that nearly has her melting into his arms.

Finally, Neal looks at her with a wicked glint in his eyes. "We're just about ready to close," he says briskly, nodding to her in silent thanks for a job well done. "I think Dr. Savetti and I can take it from here. Well done, both of you. Now get out of my way."

Leanne gets out of his way by grabbing Ed's still-gloved hand, towing him clear of Center Stage, and turning to look at him with tears flooding her eyes.

"Hi," she whispers, careless of the blood splattering her gown and gloves. "I missed you."

"I missed you, too," he says hoarsely, and squeezes her hand.

For a moment they can't move. She's too caught up in _looking_ at him; she thinks if it weren't for his tight grip on her fingers, she might just float away. He's been gone so long that this doesn't quite feel _real,_ and a part of her fears that if she even breathes wrong the spell will break.

Then he reaches up to push his mask from his face, his eyes crinkled in the intimate smile that has only ever been _hers,_ and she chokes back a sob and _reaches_ for him.

"Oh, _Lea,_ " he gasps, and sweeps her off her feet and into his arms.

Her mask falls off as she buries her face in his shoulder, and he crushes her to him like she's the only thing he'll ever want to hold. She can feel his tears on her cheek, damp lashes flickering against her temple and rolling down his face, and he lets out a hoarse, choking sob.

She tries to speak and can't. This means too much, and they have done far too much speaking and not nearly enough touching these last four weeks. So she gives up the idea entirely and just holds on to him more fiercely, because he is _home._

They'll have hours to talk, and touch, and kiss and caress and make love in the moonlight. Hours and days, weeks and months and even years, to indulge in lips and skin and voices. Right now, this is all she needs.

Lifted off her feet, held so securely in the arms of the man who loves her, she holds him even tighter and finally gives in to tears.

He's home.

And for the first time in the longest month of her life, so is she.

**Author's Note:**

> The cringingly meta alternate summary for the fic was as follows:
> 
> "In which the author attempts to get Ed and Leanne to have phone sex, and they laugh in her face. Also, FEELINGS."
> 
> Extreme thanks, as usual these days, to Iris, who got me from 'A' to 'B' in a reasonably readable manner.


End file.
